Fostering good relations: Textbooks, affordances, and the equality agenda A response to: Brown & Nanguy’s (Vol. 8, Iss. 2, 2021) ”global coursebooks and equalities legislation: A critical study”

Abstract

Brown and Nanguy use a combination of two interpretative methods, semiotic and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), to “reveal
how damaging-- from a social and a legislative perspective-- global textbooks can potentially be” and how they act as “an obstacle” to social inclusion (2021, p. 60). The current article offers an alternative analysis of Outcomes Intermediate (Dellar & Walkley, 2016a), and provides examples from other books in the series to show how some equality issues and related language have actually been actively embedded in the book curriculum—contrary to the 2021 article claims to the opposite.